Features

Richard A. Meserve

Climate change presents a grave threat, demanding increasing reliance on low-carbon energy over the coming decades. Nuclear power today contributes half of U.S. low-carbon generation, and achievement of climate goals requires the continued operation of existing plants. But there are competitors for low-carbon energy, and nuclear’s further role remains uncertain. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) conducted a study to explore the challenges that must be overcome for widespread new nuclear deployment.¹ This article provides my summary of the study, highlighting and abbreviating some of its principal recommendations. Note that the italicized portions of the article are shortened versions of the recommendations in the report.

Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.

Researchers at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), in concert with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Florida International University, are leading the Advanced Long-Term Environmental Monitoring Systems (ALTEMIS) project to move groundwater cleanup from a reactive process to a proactive process, while also reducing the cost of long-term monitoring and accelerating site closure.

It is the 1940s in Maywood, N.J. A new residential community has sprouted up, and the homeowners want to beautify their front lawns, so they go to a nearby property to gather some fresh topsoil. Little did they know that they’re helping to plant the seeds for one of the largest and most high-profile environmental cleanup projects in the nation.

Currently, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is overseeing 17 nuclear power plants that are undergoing active decommissioning. For 10 of those plants, the NRC licenses have been transferred, either through sale or temporary transfer, from the plant owner and operator to a third party, nonutility company for decommissioning. To be profitable, those companies are decommissioning the nuclear plants as expediently as they safely can, while still protecting workers and the environment, using proprietary techniques and processes.

Among the typical bustle of outage activities at the Surry Power Station in Virginia during the fall of 2022, an unfamiliar sound broke through the commotion. Even with hearing protection in place, a faint whir thunk, whir thunk, whir thunk could be heard, announcing the arrival of the latest innovation in nuclear power. Dominion Energy, owner and operator of Surry, had combined new technologies from robotics company Boston Dynamics and radiation detection company Gamma Reality Inc. to provide radiological condition monitoring throughout the plant that could protect technicians from radiation exposure. The result? A quadruped robot with real-time 3D radiation mapping and data fusion capabilities.

Anyone involved in the nuclear power industry could tell you that the operation of nuclear power plants is a demanding and never-ending endeavor. Our machines are complex, our challenges are diverse, and our standards are unyielding. The truth is, however, many of us stay in this field because there’s something at the heart of what we do that makes it all worthwhile.

Operating costs for nuclear units have grown significantly since the start of the commercial nuclear power industry. For nuclear power generation to remain competitive, process efficiencies and innovations will need to be introduced. The challenge for any change is to improve the safe operation of the nuclear unit. An area of opportunity to reduce operating costs while improving operational safety is through upgraded fuel design and manufacturing. At Southern Nuclear, the pressurized water reactor fuel engineering team worked with Westinghouse to implement the PRIME fuel features, where simple improvements would yield safer operation and long-term cost-savings due to a more robust fuel design. Implementing the PRIME fuel ensures that the operator’s burden from fuel performance is minimized while keeping the reactor unit in a safe operating condition.

Barnard

It’s late March 2023, and freshman state Rep. Stephanie Barnard (R., 8th Dist.) moves quickly through the halls of the capitol building in Olympia, Wash. She enters a room packed with state legislators—both Democrats and Republicans—who are waiting for a meeting to begin.

The event is part of the recently formed Nuclear Energy Caucus, and the featured speaker is Carol Browner, director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy under President Obama and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration. The meeting is a success, with animated discussion following Browner’s address.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I were looking to purchase a new car. But just as we made that decision, major pricing inflation and supply constraints became an issue. So, we decided to wait. We also knew that we would need new tires before we could sell our current vehicle. Instead of buying the best quality (and expensive) tires, we got the much cheaper ones, knowing we would only use them for a brief period. Why invest in an asset that won’t be serving its purpose for you that much longer, right?

Matt Rasmussen

Do you remember the days when nuclear was a contractor’s dream? When craftworkers could work outages every fall and spring at a high wage and make enough to take summers off? When companies had to turn down craftworkers looking for outage work because there were more people than positions? Well, those days are far behind us. How many of us struggle every year to fill our outage billets for pipefitters, boilermakers, and electricians? How many of us see return rates of less than 50 percent for some sites?

Our own worst enemy

Industrial growth and demand in the United States have skyrocketed over the past 10 years in no small part due to our ability to provide reliable and low-cost power. The Tennessee Valley region’s population is growing at three times the national average. Nashville is growing at the rate of one Chattanooga—that is, 180,000 people—every four years.

Maintenance can mean no more than keeping the status quo. But plant maintenance programs at U.S. nuclear power plants do that and then some. Even the programs are themselves maintained and improved—and so a long-lived nuclear fleet has improved with time. Read on.

A digital twin is a virtual replica of a real system or physical asset. It is a trusted data source containing vital information about an asset, which could include dimensions, relevant manufacturer information, operations history, and maintenance records. To realize the maximal benefit from a digital twin at a nuclear power plant, for example, it must evolve as the facility is designed, constructed, and operated. Some general attributes and the resulting benefits of a digital twin follow:

The American Nuclear Society is pleased to celebrate Mehdi Sarram on the 60th anniversary of his membership. He joined the Society in 1963 when he was an undergraduate in nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan and has since served the nuclear energy industry as a nuclear engineer, reactor operator, professor, and mentor. Over the years, Sarram has been active in several local ANS sections and has made remarkable contributions to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, including bringing Iran’s first nuclear reactor to full power.

For many of us, the toys of our childhood leave indelible marks on our consciousness, affecting our long-term perceptions and attitudes about certain things. Hot Wheels may inspire a lifelong fascination with fast, flashy automobiles, while Barbies might shape ideas about beauty and self-­image. For the generation who grew up during the Atomic Age—the post–World War II era from roughly the mid-1940s to the early 1960s—the toys, games, and entertainment of their childhoods might have included things like atomic pistols, atomic trains, rings with tiny amounts of radioactive elements, and comic books, puzzles, and music about nuclear weapons.

The last time a human entered the Pile Fuel Storage Pond at the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, England, was in 1958, when records show a maintenance operator and health physics monitor carried out a dive into the newly constructed pond to repair a broken winch. At least that was true until December 2022, when Josh Everett, a diver from the U.K. specialist nuclear diving team Underwater Construction Corporation (UCC) UK Ltd., became the first person in more than 60 years to work in one of the most unique workplaces in the world.

Last year, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) released its 2022 list of 50 minerals that are essential to the function of our society, especially the economy and national security. Whether it’s indium for LCD screens and aircraft wind shielding, cobalt for iPhones, uranium for nuclear reactors and munitions, rare earth elements for wind turbine magnets, lithium for rechargeable batteries, or tantalum for electronic components, if we do not have an ample supply, bad things will happen.

W. A. “Art” Wharton III

Multiple market forces on nuclear fuel have arisen seemingly at the same time since the Russian war in Ukraine started. Accident tolerant fuels (ATF), lead test rods, and lead test assemblies have had their first shot in real operating conditions, in recent cycles. But the popularity of their so-called accident tolerance has nothing to do with accidents, since any practical nuclear professional knows that the safety of nuclear energy is already higher than that of any other electricity generation source. The popularity comes down to fuel performance. Are we on the cusp of a revolution in nuclear fuel performance under the guise of accident tolerance?

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), an anthropogenic class of several thousand chemicals made for use in products such as nonstick cookware, water-, grease-, and stain-resistant materials, surfactants, and fire suppression foams [1], are emerging as a complicating factor in nuclear decommissioning. These chemicals, which have been manufactured globally, including in the United States, have gained regulatory and public attention due to their persistence and ubiquity in the environment, ability to be detected at low parts-per-trillion levels, and health-based standards set at levels hundreds to thousands of times lower than more classic contaminants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

This year’s American Nuclear Society Annual Meeting was filled with great content, some of which was covered in the August issue of Nuclear News (beginning on p. 22). One of the meeting’s executive sessions, “Bringing Nuclear History Forward,” focused on advanced reactor (AR) history and was well attended. The United States—along with many countries around the world—is turning to nuclear to combat climate change. Part of this is funding new and innovative companies to create first-of-a-kind nuclear reactors to provide abundant and clean power. Looking at the current designs of interest to the community brings up interesting comparisons to the test and experimental reactors of the past. Test reactors like the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II), the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF), Peach Bottom, Fort St. Vrain, Germany’s AVR, and others now are more important than ever in providing insight, data, and operational lessons learned to develop the next generation of reactors.